The Rwandan Genocide

It is Sunday today and I refer it to a Holy day. The day when most of us chill out and relax. This time, let see how much we know about the term “Genocide”. It is a very specific term, referring to violent crimes committed against groups with the intent to destroy the existence of the group or ethnic.

This term existed in 1944, when a Polish-Jewish lawyer named Raphael Lemkin sought the way to describe Nazi policies of systematic murder, including the destruction of the European Jews. He formed the word "genocide" by combining geno-, from the Greek word for race or tribe, with -cide, from the Latin word for killing. In proposing this new term, Lemkin had in mind "a coordinated plan of different actions aiming at the destruction of essential foundations of the life of national groups, with the aim of conquering the groups themselves."

The genocide that I want to share here is the one happened in Rwanda, back in 1994. Maybe that time I was a little young and might not aware of what happened in that part of the world. I’m sure I neither read newspaper nor watch news on TV that time. Rwanda is a country in East Africa. The whole thing started after the assassination of Rwanda President Juvénal Habyarimana where the airplane carrying him together with Burundi President, Cyprien Ntaryamira was shot down when it was preparing to land in Kigali, Rwanda on the evening of 6^th April, 1994. This assassination was the catalyst of the genocide.

I’m not interested into the whole ordeal of the genocide because it is too cruel and inhumane for me to accept but I will share some history of it so we get the idea of the official term of Rwandan Genocide. What I’m really interested to share with all of you is the aftermath stories. How does the women, the war or rape victims cope up with their life. Until today, the trauma of the genocide which happened almost two decades ago in Rwanda still exists.

According to Wikipedia:-

The Rwandan Genocide was the 1994 mass murder of an estimated 800,000 people in the small East African nation of Rwanda. Over the course of approximately 100 days (from the assassination of Juvénal Habyarimana and Cyprien Ntaryamira on April 6) through mid-July, over 500,000 people were killed, according to a Human Rights Watch estimate.

[1] Estimates of the death toll have ranged between 500,000 and 1,000,000,

[2] or as much as 20% of the country's total population.

It was the culmination of longstanding ethnic competition and tensions between the minority Tutsi, who had controlled power for centuries, and the majority Hutu peoples, who had come to power in the rebellion of 1959–1962 and overthrown the Tutsi monarchy.

In 1990, the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF), a rebel group composed mostly of Tutsi refugees, invaded northern Rwanda from Uganda in an attempt to defeat the Hutu-led government. They began the Rwandan Civil War, fought between the Hutu regimes. This exacerbated ethnic tensions in the country. In response, many Hutu gravitated toward the Hutu Power ideology, with the prompting of state-controlled and independent Rwandan media.

Now, can you imagine what is the state of a country whereby within the period of just 100 days, there were 800,000 people killed. Simply put it as a war between two ethnics, the Hutu and Tutsi. There is a movie in 2004 (on the 10^th years anniversary) titled Hotel Rwanda, starring Don Cheadle. This is a true-life story of Paul Rusesabagina, a hotel manager who housed over a thousand Tutsi refugees during their struggle against the Hutu militia in Rwanda. It is a good watch. Read my next post on the survival stories of Rwanda women.